Saturday, August 6, 2011

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Finding Balance With Asperger's: Textured Dominoes for Sensory Development

Most children on the autism spectrum have sensory integration problems and, as I’ve said before, my son, Quinn’s diagnosis of Asperger’s includes these issues. Because of this, anything that helps develop his tactile senses is a must-have. The Texture Dominoes that Guidecraft sells on their site is a great way to give Quinn a very sensory-developing activity that is also fun to do. Texture Dominoes are dominoes played in the same traditional way that classic dominoes are played, but with a fun twist: they include textures to match instead of simply matching pictures or dots. The dominoes have foam, ridges, carpet, sandpaper, wood, felt, and more textures to make playing dominoes a complete sensory experience. In addition to developing tactile concepts, it also helps with intellectual skills and problem solving to play the game, social skills because of playing with a partner, and fine motor because the pieces are small. Texture Dominoes are great for any child, but especially great when used as a therapy tool for ASD diagnoses.

Quinn really loved playing with the dominoes and had to be pushed out of his comfort zone with some of the textures, like the sandpaper. Sometimes we play just by matching the colors of the textures and other times we play only by texture matching. We’ve even played blindfolded, though it was difficult. As with all Guidecraft’s products, they are well made and will last for years to come. The dominoes are made of solid wood and the textures are made from high quality materials that I named above. I have had a couple of the round textures pop out, but I just glued them back in and they were fine.

You can purchase Texture Dominoes on Guidecraft.com, Amazon.com, and other major retailers of developmental toys. This set retails for $18.

Thank you to Guidecraft for providing a complimentary product sample for us to base this review upon.